A novel two-stage method to detect non-technical losses in smart grids

Numerous strategies have been proposed for the detection and prevention of non-technical electricity losses due to fraudulent activities. Among these, machine learning algorithms and data-driven techniques have gained prominence over traditional methodologies due to their superior performance, leading to a trend of increasing adoption in recent years. A novel two-step process is presented for detecting fraudulent Non-technical losses (NTLs) in smart grids. The first step involves transforming the time-series data with additional extracted features derived from the publicly available State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) dataset. The features are extracted after identifying abrupt changes in electricity consumption patterns using the sum of finite differences, the Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average model, and the Holt-Winters model. Following this, five distinct classification models are used to train and evaluate a fraud detection model using the SGCC dataset. The evaluation results indicate that the most effective model among the five is the Gradient Boosting Machine. This two-step approach enables the classification models to surpass previously reported high-performing methods in terms of accuracy, F1-score, and other relevant metrics for non-technical loss detection.